Google’s AI Overviews Are Killing Search. A New Study Shows the Best Way to Protect Your Traffic

Google’s new AI Overview tool has “dramatically impacted” click-through rates, or CTRs, according to a new study by marketing agency Seer Interactive. Since Google introduced the feature last spring, organic and paid CTRs have fallen by 61 percent and 68 percent respectively.

But there is a way brands can fare better in this shifted environment. Websites cited within AI overviews enjoy 35 percent higher organic CTRs and 91 percent higher paid CTRs, according to the study, which analyzed 3,119 search terms from June 2024 to October 2025. That means it’s in your best interest to make sure your website is optimized for the best chance of citation.

“We cannot definitively prove that citation causes higher CTRs,” writes Tracy McDonald, product development lead at Seer, because “it’s equally possible that brands with stronger authority and higher baseline CTRs are simply more likely to be cited by Google’s AI.”

“What we can say with confidence,” she adds, “is that queries where you’re cited consistently outperform those where you’re not, regardless of the causal direction.”

CTRs are still significantly down across the board. Even for queries in which a website is mentioned in an AI overview, organic and paid rates now sit at 0.70 percent and 7.89 percent on average—drops of nearly 49.4 percent and 53.9 percent year-over-year respectively, according to the study. When a website isn’t cited, averages look even more dismal: 0.52 percent for organic CTRs and 4.14 percent for paid.

When no AI overview appears, on the other hand, organic CTRs typically reach 1.45 percent and paid CTRs reach 13.88 percent.

According to McDonald, this means that “if you’re running paid campaigns on informational keywords where [AI Overviews] appear, you’re now capturing a fraction of the clicks you were getting just over a year ago.” Instead of ignoring this reality, she advises marketers to start treating Google’s AI Overviews as their “competitive moat.”

“Your share, authority, and that CTR boost are one of the few remaining ways to maintain competitive separation,” McDonald writes. “This [change] is shifting that focus from traditional rankings and traffic to authority and brand visibility.”

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